Pop Music

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CreditJon McNaught

By James Parker

Dec. 5, 2014

Tone, it’s all about tone. If you’re writing a book “with” a rock star — if you’re crouched in a darkened room, that is, with your quill quivering, waiting for the legend slumped opposite you to ingest an amount of caffeine/nicotine sufficient to propel him through the charred drug-holes of his own memory — you’ve got to get the tone just right. Outside, the inevitable California afternoon blazes with cruel banality; inside, it’s 2 a.m. forever. An ear rings, a synapse misfires. Your rock star ­begins to ramble. How true will you be to the tone of his talk, to his fractured anecdotal style with the woozy ­silences and the skeletal chuckles? Will you fix his grammar, trim his profanities, check his facts? He’s just told a story that has no ending, no point — almost no beginning. Are his eyes even open? Impossible to tell through the dark glasses. You might have to make half of this up.

So I commend David Ritz, co-author of Joe Perry’s ROCKS: My Life in and Out of Aerosmith (Simon & Schuster, $27.99), for setting down in his book the following sentence: “A free-spirited woman with an affinity for unabashed sex and good coke may be seen as a gift from the heavens.” Read it a second time, please. Tonally, everything about that line — from the denim-and-roach-clips vibe of “free-spirited woman” to the slight weirdness of “unabashed sex” to the heavy-lidded hauteur of “gift from the heavens” — feels right. Sounds right. Sounds like Joe Perry — or the Joe Perry of our imaginings, the chiseled guitar overlord, a rime of cocaine around the nostril, who in Aerosmith was the Richards to Steven Tyler’s Jagger, the Patrick to his SpongeBob, the Dennett to his Dawkins.

Unbeatable on their night — witty, slobbering, ­inventive, with stadium wallop and bar-band looseness — Aerosmith was massive in the ’70s and then, less enjoyably, massive again in the ’90s. In the sociology of rock, however, die-hard Aerosmith fans have remained something of an aggrieved underclass: How come their guys don’t get the respect? “Rocks” partakes here and there of this sense of tribal pique — “Not then, not now, not ever would we win over the hearts of the New York critical elite” — although Perry is also disarmingly upfront about Aerosmith’s lapses in quality control, or (as he calls it) “the decay of our artistry.” What caused it? The life, the life. Their peak was their trough. We learn from “Rocks” that during the recording of the wretched (but very successful) 1977 album “Draw the Line,” in a specially equipped former nunnery, Perry would wake up, sling back a double black Russian and start shooting. “Since I was usually the last one up, the popping of the .22 echoed through the halls and let everyone know I was awake.”

I worried at first about the tonal discrepancies in George Clinton’s BROTHAS BE, YO LIKE GEORGE, AIN’T THAT FUNKIN’ KINDA HARD ON YOU? A Memoir (Atria, $27) — audacious mouthful of a title — which was written “with” Ben Greenman. But then I stopped worrying. If it takes a paragraph or two of dutiful facts-based prose to get to the saltier stuff — “Detroit pimps wore store-bought suits. In New York, you couldn’t be pimping and buy no goddamn store-bought suit” — then so be it. Besides, Clinton himself has always been a man of more than one voice. The gibbering Prospero behind the enchanted, polyvalent island of blackness that was the Parliament-Funkadelic collective, he was a commercial visionary and cultural ­virologist who did his work behind masks of nonsense. Can his book fail to be interesting? It cannot.

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Aerosmith's Joe Perry.CreditRoss Halfin

In places “Brothas Be” recalls Charles Mingus’s great jazz memoir, “Beneath the Underdog,” with that same mixture of giddy artistic enterprise and hard, worldly game playing. Clinton and his musicians supplied the wildest and most dazzling acid rock of the early ’70s, the squelchiest astro-funk of the late ’70s, and then returned — sampled and postmodernized — as the rhythmic marrow of ’90s West Coast hip-hop. Sly Stone was Clinton’s great friend and drug buddy; finding himself low on ­supplies one night, he slipped a handwritten note under Clinton’s hotel room door. “Knock knock, put a rock in a sock and sock it to me, doc. Signed, co-junkie for the funk.” (“Like a song lyric,” comments Clinton.)

I finished “Brothas Be” with the sensation that I had been in touch with an indestructible intelligence, with a strain of humor so cosmically rarefied it had looped back on itself and become down-to-earth. Even when he’s sitting on a kilo of cocaine, playing with the Mickey and Minnie Mouse marionettes that are hanging from his ceiling, putting money in their puppet hands (“Mickey had 2,000, Minnie had the same”), Clinton seems to know what he’s doing. Here’s how he launched the fragile-­genius guitarist Eddie Hazel on the shattering 10-minute solo that was “Maggot Brain” (1971): “Before he started, I told him to play like his mother had died.”

The guitarist Scott Ian’s memoir, I’M THE MAN: The ­Story of That Guy From Anthrax (Da Capo, $28.99), was written “with” Jon Wiederhorn, and for consistency of tone this one wins the prize. Of the so-called Big Four — the four champion bands to emerge from the thrash/speed metal upheaval of the late ’80s — New York’s Anthrax was the secular option. Not for them the doomsday snarlings of Megadeth, the hell-precipitation of Slayer or the grim prophetic witness of Metallica: Anthrax’s was materialist metal, demon-free, a closed system whose sonic ­signature was the dry chordal blare and backward-dragging downstroke of Ian’s guitar. The voice of “I’m the Man” is jabby, gabby and metal-obsessed, and the book’s most exhilarating passages are about metal itself — about the moment, for example, when the burgeoning thrash scene was something between a coterie of mutual influence and a Darwinian death race, and everyone suddenly needed a drummer who could play “double bass,” superfast, with two kick-drum pedals. (Anthrax landed the master drummer Charlie Benante, who stormed his audition by proving himself physically capable of ­Accept’s “Fast as a Shark,” and whose shifting, gridlike patterns would help define the band.)

Also interesting is Ian’s account of the recording of Anthrax’s 1987 breakthrough album, “Among the Living,” with the veteran producer Eddie Kramer. The charts are booming with the enormous, frosted artificialities of Def Leppard, and Kramer — who has worked with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin — wants to lend Anthrax something of the sound du jour. So he gives them the full treatment, twiddles all the knobs, layering the mix with reverb and expanding it with delay — much to Ian’s consternation. Ian demands less. Words are had, after which Kramer (in Ian’s version) peevishly attempts “to make the record sound bad by yanking every bit of reverb and delay off everything.” An untextured, bare-bones mix, horribly ­immediate. But Anthrax is delighted. “It sounded . . . great, like we were getting pummeled in the chest.” Band and audience have identical needs at this point: “The new music we had was undeniable and would hit people like a brick across the face. From experience, I knew metalheads love that feeling.”

Viv Albertine’s CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC ­MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, $27.99) was written “with” nobody at all — which in this context, in this genre, counts almost as a political act. Albertine played guitar for the Slits, the fearless all-­female unit that (among other things) opened for the Clash on the 1977 “White Riot” tour. She writes beautifully, in a dreamy, self-interrogating, pre-Internet continuous present, a kind of imagistic drift in which the pale antiheroes of London punk rock come and go like skinny-legged ­poems. On Sid Vicious: “Everything he does he takes as far as he can. He detaches himself from fear, remorse, caring about his safety or his looks and just becomes a vessel for other people’s fantasies about him, like Paul Newman in ‘Cool Hand Luke.’ ” The young punks having succeeded (amazingly) in making sex uncool, Albertine and Vicious lie back to back in bed, in chaste paranoia. “As the sun comes up, we edge closer and closer to each other in tiny little movements, hoping not to be detected. By the morning we’re pressed hard against each other, back to back, stuck together with sweat, making as much physical contact as possible.”

The guitar druid Keith Levene, soon to invent a new guitar language with Public Image Ltd., is Albertine’s musical mentor, rallying her from her “Guitar Depressions” (“He says he has them all the time, it happens when you stall in your learning”) and applauding the untutored noises she is beginning to make — “humming, buzzing and fizzing like a wasp trapped in a jam jar.” Johnny Thunders is coming over from New York, news of which is “like hearing Dracula is on his way to our shores in the hold of a ship.” He does not disappoint: “He acts like he can barely stand up but his fingers glide up and down the guitar neck as easily as if he’s running them through his hair.” Albertine and Thunders kiss, and he breaks off to shout to a bandmate, “I felt something!” But there can be no love. “He’s got no room for love, his heart is full of heroin.”

And then there are the punk rock women: the ­designer Vivienne Westwood; Chrissie Hynde, later of the Pretenders; hanging out at the attitudinal test tube that was the Sex clothing store. “Once when Vivienne asked Chrissie a question, Chrissie replied, ‘Oh, I just go with the flow.’ Vivienne thought that was unacceptable and wouldn’t speak to her again for a year.” And the volcanic Ari Up, dreads piled high, who became frontwoman of the Slits when she was 14 years old: “wonderful and terrible in equal measure.” Growing up in the band, Ari is stabbed in two separate incidents and — like the rest of the women — regularly “attacked, spat at, sworn at and laughed at.” Not quite like being in Aerosmith, then.

Billy Idol also wrote his book by himself. “I contemplated deep, caliginous, silent thoughts that hinted of a darker America.” Caliginous, eh? (Adj., misty; dim; obscure; dark.) That’s what I’m talking about. DANCING WITH MYSELF (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $28), like the man himself, is all over the place — now chatty (“Zowie was 16, blond and a bit of a scrubber”), now caliginous, now encrusted with sub-Jim Morrisonian lyricism: “Gone was time; gone was ambition. Dance with me, for I have lost the Lioness’s embrace. . . . The wedding feast is here, and I must tell of the forbidden journey where sanity is best lost.” Well, if you must, you must. But I never expected to like Billy Idol, and after reading his book, oddly, I do. He’s a genuine romantic, writing in a kind of overheated journalese about his London punk rock roots — “Our youth, desires and needs and the rush of energy engendered by the joining of like minds crested into a tidal wave of exploding passion” — and then falling head over heels for America: America, with its embraceable lions and its flowering landscapes of electro-rockabilly.

His plentiful atrocities are penitently recounted, as when he wrecks a rented Jet Ski in the Thai resort of Pattaya and then flings $25,000 at the family that owns it. “The Jet Ski was their livelihood. Looking back, I feel just awful about it, but I was really too sick and stoned to fully appreciate the situation at the time.” Of all these memoirs, “Dancing With Myself” was the only one that stimulated my envy — made me want to be Billy Idol for five minutes. “When he looks back,” George Steiner wrote, “the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow.” When Billy looks back, he sees the shadow of a red-eyed priapic cyborg. On a Jet Ski.

Should Neil Young have written his new book, ­SPECIAL DELUXE (Blue Rider, $32), “with” somebody? If you read his last book, “Waging Heavy Peace,” you may well think so. Young writes not prose, exactly, so much as a sort of beatific pre-prose, with no editors for miles. He is a great artist, one of the greatest in rock ‘n’ roll, but his art is ­music. “In this book, I am looking at my relationship with cars over many years.” With a writer (the journalist Scott Young) for a father, he reasons, “I could surely pull something together that would be of interest to somebody and potentially keep me busy for a while, which I really would appreciate.” See what I mean? Guileless as an ear of corn.

“Special Deluxe” is shorter than “Waging Heavy Peace,” and there are fewer paragraphs where it sounds as if he’s talking to his dog, but oh, the mind wanders — his and ours. Now and then he questions his great love for cars: “With cars, collecting and obsession walk a similar path. There is a fine line between the two and I was close to it. I was beginning to wonder about ­myself, but luckily for me, the feeling passed.” Or again: “Around 1972, I bought another car in L.A. I don’t know what the heck got into me. I think I have a disease.” About his childhood, he writes with stoned radiance — but then he writes about his adulthood with stoned radiance too. All I wanted to do was put the book down and hear “Blue, blue windows behind the stars, / Yellow moon on the rise. . . . “

By the end of “Special Deluxe,” with climate change pressing upon him, Young is driving around in his Lincvolt — his revolutionary biomass-propelled hybrid 1959 Lincoln Continental. He frowns, he is purposeful; he’s on a mission to reshape our consumption of fossil fuels. Can Neil Young stop global warming? I don’t see why not. After these two almost unreadable books of his, I suspect there’s something saintly about him. So in case nobody’s made this joke before: Long may he run on cellulosic ethanol.